Archives for January 2015

I’m sitting here, wearing a pair of merino long johns, under a pair of thermal leggings, a t-shirt, a thermal shirt, a gigantic men’s hoodie, a pair of Phil’s hiking socks, and my slippers, and I am cold. The heat is on, the house is clearly warm, and yet, I am freezing. It’s a bitterly cold night, the Beeb informs me, with a temperature of 0 centigrade expected, or an imperial 32F.

The shades of my hardy Eastern European peasant ancestors laugh at me. These are the people who moved across the Atlantic, a hundred-odd years ago, got to Ellis Island, and kept going, until they landed in the upper midwest, where they looked around and said, yes, this place is covered in snow for half the year, and infested with mosquitoes the other half, we’ll stay here. I moved in the opposite direction across the Atlantic going on for two decades ago, and spent much of that time not even owning a proper winter coat, because low 30s? Pshaw. Put on a sweater and stop whining. You should try living in the snow belt. This thin dusting of white stuff? You ought to try lake effect snow. You can get a couple of feet of that stuff in a couple of hours. I join my ancestors in laughing at you.

And then I lost an improbably huge amount of weight, and my body’s internal thermostat never recovered from the shock, and here I am, with an impressive collection of winter coats, and a stupid furry hat with cat ears on it, and on occasion still so cold I pray for hot flashes. Sadly, they usually arrive in the middle of the night, when I am tucked cosily into bed, wearing multiple layers of clothing, and under at least two duvets, not when I’m trudging up the hill to Sainsbury’s, into an icy gale. At least I didn’t forget how to walk on black ice. (Slowly, cautiously, fall anyway.)

There was one week in January, the winter before I moved over here, where the temperature never got above zero. Ever. It never got above -10 or so, in fact. And yet, I went to work. I knocked a foot of snow off my car, chiselled off the ice – -not even wearing gloves! — and drove to work every day. (That part about the gloves was stupid, but I was fine, once I got in my car.) A day like this in January was a gift. People took smoke breaks at work, without even bothering to put on their coats. Over here, we’re all dying, except for those daft girls who are running around without coats, so everybody can see their cute outfits. And their blue arms and legs. (That’s the only possible explanation I can come up with, as it’s the kind of mad thing I would’ve done in my own youth.) I don’t want to get fat again, but I sure as hell wouldn’t mind feeling that well-insulated.

I have finally come to know, really, intimately, know the feeling of a regionalism Phil introduced me to, the first winter we were married, when he was cold and I was trying to open a window, because the flat felt stuffy and uncomfortably warm to me: nesh. I am nesh, all the way through, almost all the time now, and man, I am sorry for ever doubting such a state could exist, and grateful somebody came up with a single word to describe it.

So I’ve been digging out the crap caches, and while most of the stuff I’m finding is crap, some of it’s actually valuable or at least entertaining. Whilst digging through an enormous wooden bowl of cruft, I found a laser cat toy I bought a couple of years ago, when I found it in the pet Christmas present display at Sainsbury’s, and which Flash found intermittently entertaining until it disappeared into the cruft bowl. Surprisingly, the battery is still working, and so I spent about ten minutes exercising old fatboy with the red dot. Until he figured out the exciting red dot was coming from the shiny silver thing in my hand, at which point he ran up and started rubbing his cheek pads against it. (I was sitting on the floor.) I was shocked that he appeared to have figured it out. Cognition seems to have happened, and I’m really not sure what to make of it.

Understand: this cat is stupid. Oh god, is he stupid. He has a certain degree of craftiness to his stupidity; he is, after all, a cat, and he’s got enough going on between his fuzzy ears to keep us attending to his needs and humouring his little quirks. I suppose it’s unfair of me to categorise him as stupid, since he is, in fact, exactly as smart as he needs to be, which isn’t very, since the kibble is going to keep coming and the used litter is going to keep going, and being a cat, he isn’t going to work any harder than he needs to, once those needs are met.

Then, of course, we come to the (very) small fortune in change I found in the same bowl, and the bottoms of departing handbags and pockets of off-season coats, along with the change dumped into various baskets and boxes for what reason I cannot tell you, other than to say money is valuable, and thus, small amounts of it wind up in nominally safe places until they can be consolidated into a large enough quantity to be taken in and fed to the coin machine. Yes, it’s kind of a rip off, but I’ll pay a smallish commission to spare myself having to roll coins to take to the bank.

Once again, I unearthed my sole surviving pair of Fat Pants, which I keep as a memento morbid obesity, and pull out on these periodic purges, to gape at their size, because holy shit. Holy shit. I knew I was that fat — my eyes certainly weren’t bigger than my stomach, but they worked well enough to let me know I was extremely fat — but graphic proof is still stunning. Brrrr.

So I offloaded a bunch of stuff, including things Phil has shrunk out of (yay, Phil!) and things that have no use, and found some good stuff that got buried under the useless stuff in the process, so it’s all good. How we came to own the three unused electric toothbrushes I found while cleaning out the bathroom cabinets is a mystery to me, since I didn’t buy them, but I’m assuming they were gifts from my late mother-in-law. I think we’re set on those for quite some time. I emptied and moved my biggest chest of drawers to vacuum behind it, and found the beautiful silver and garnet ring I bought in Edinburgh a couple of years ago, which, outside of a bit of tarnish, is as lovely as ever.

I don’t feel like I’m anywhere near done with this project — the dreaded understair cupboard remains, for example, and Oh God the Books — but I think I’m falling into a habit of spending an hour or so decluttering every morning, and it helps me feel like I will eventually get to where I want to be, which is in a house where I don’t feel oppressed by its contents.

I read somewhere that you spend the first half of your life accumulating stuff, and the second trying to get rid of it. Something like that, anyway. There’s no hope of me finding the exact quote, and it sounds like the sort of thing that’s been said in many ways, many times, by people far pithier than I am.

I would like that to be true, but I live with an inveterate packrat with lots of equipment-rich hobbies, which is mostly A-OK with me, since I’m fond of him, so becoming a minimalist is probably not in my future. I am, however, trying to get rid of a lot of stuff that he won’t miss or care about, and which drives me up the wall. Yes, I, of course, downloaded the book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying, which is currently all the rage, but that’s not the impetus, just an interesting coincidence of timing. Thus proving I am sincere, I bought it for my iPad, so as to avoid bringing another bloody object into my house. We shall overlook the fact that the iPad is yet another object I have recently brought into my house, because, technically Phil is the one who brought it into the house as my Xmas present. Which I wanted, of course.

I’ve only glanced through it so far, but the one thing I’ve immediately started implementing is the author’s slightly strange (to me, and many others) suggestion of thanking items you’re getting rid of, and saying goodbye to them. Oh god, I felt like an idiot sitting on the bed in the guest room, where I have stashed way too much crap, thanking a handbag for its service, and wishing it well, before saying goodbye and sticking it in a donation bag. (Imagine dumping somebody: It’s not you, handbag! It’s me! I’ve changed!) Then I did it again and again, and pretty soon, I got over being embarrassed about doing something so…I dunno. I don’t want to knock her, since she’s heavily influenced by Shintoism, and I can understand why she suggests this process, but I’ll just say it’s TOTALLY unlike me to do that.

Thing is, it’s working for me. It’s somewhat easier to say, yeah, I liked this thing (or didn’t, but somehow felt obligated to keep it), but it no longer is of any use to me, than it is to berate myself for having bought this thing in the first place, or held onto it because somebody else gave it to me, and I feel bad about giving it away. (Part of my dumping speech is noting that I hope the object enriches or helps somebody else. I try to let my stuff down easy.)

Mind you, there’s also just crap that goes straight into the bin. Oh, so much crap. Why do I do this? Why do I hang onto shit that is objectively shit? Why do we have so many biros? I mean, I know how; Phil brings them home from hotels and job sites, and they apparently breed in the places where I toss them, when I’m doing surface-tidying.

So, my current project is going to all those ugly little places I stash crap I don’t quite know what to do with, and deciding what to do with it. This often means throwing away fifty dried-out biros, putting a handful of dusty coins in the change bucket, and chucking a bunch of receipts, expired coupons, and bus passes into the recycling bin. Out with the half-eaten packets of stale sugar-free Polos, and the elderly rolls of no-longer-sticky tape! Goodbye chargers from mobile phones that were made redundant ten years ago. And the keys! The keys. What do the keys unlock? I have no idea. They look like chintzy luggage keys. Maybe. I don’t know. Better hang onto those until I figure it out.

And sometimes, it means getting rid of good stuff. Stuff that we paid money for, and didn’t use, or quit using when we paid money for more stuff. I’m not sure what we’re going to do with the computer graveyard in Phil’s man cave, but I noted to him last night that we’ve got a computer in there that is seventeen years old. I know exactly how old it is, because we bought it around the time we got married. And part of me feels a weird, sentimental attachment to it because of that! It’s a dead computer. It’s been dead for at least ten years, and probably more (because right next to it is the dead Macintosh tower that replaced it, and died as well, before we moved into this house about ten years ago) and yet…I remember that as our first major purchase as a married couple. It has to go. Eventually. In the meantime, I have a couple dozen unmatched socks and too many oversized bras with busted underwires from my fat days that need to go to the clothing recycler. I’ll be sure to thank them for their loyal support before they go.

We have a mixed marriage, when it comes to food. Phil is all about the low-carb and protein, and left to my own devices, were it not for my addiction to Fage 0% Greek Yogurt, and skim milk in my coffee and tea, I would almost certainly be a vegan. Given our current schedule of him being away the first few days of the week, I am basically a part-time vegetarian, and a lazy one at that. I think too hard about what to cook for other people; when I am just feeding myself, I make a hell of a lot of vegetable curries, and by curries, I mean I sling pre-cut vegetables in a pan with a tin of chopped tomatoes, and a spoonful of whichever curry paste I’ve got in the fridge in a pan, and cook it until it reaches a pleasing consistency, then, god help me, sometimes I eat it straight from the pan. Over the hob, because why dirty a dish, when only the cat and god can see my shame? And the cat’s only there because he’s hoping I’ll give him one of his treats. He doesn’t judge.

Basically, I turn into a total degenerate when I’m on my own. A fairly healthy degenerate, but a degenerate, all the same. I stab plastic pillows of vegetables with my fancy chef’s knife, microwave them for a couple of minutes, and then cover them with enough sriracha sauce to kill a normal person, and call it a meal. I eat this crappy, rock-bottom ASDA salad mix, comprised of iceberg lettuce, grated carrot, and cabbage with the vinaigrette I have leftover from the weekend, when I am trying to give the impression I am a civilised person, and call it salad. I’m too damn lazy to slice up a cucumber or a tomato. When I inevitably run out of vinaigrette (because I don’t make much in one go, god forbid I should give my husband or father-in-law anything but the freshest food) on the second or third day, I eat it plain. I don’t care! Years of dieting my formerly fat self down and keeping off the massive, massive weight loss have blunted my personal standards so much that I actually like abominations like PB2 and artificial sweeteners just fine, so why am I going to bother to make salad dressing when there’s no one around to impress, since plain iceberg lettuce tastes perfectly OK to me? We’ve got a fancy espresso machine sitting right there on the counter top, but fuck if I’m going to clean that thing if I don’t have to, so instant coffee it is. (To be fair, there’s been a huge improvement in instant coffee in recent years, although who am I kidding, it’s still swill.)

I would not dream of feeding another person this way. I am actually a very good, very creative, cook, as long as there’s somebody around to be impressed, but he’ll be on the road for another couple of days, so chances are I might just go to the chippy tonight, since I do not do deep frying. One, I’m afraid of burning down the house, and two, what the hell do you do with the used oil? I have a modest collection of small bottles of oil (olive, canola, sesame, something vaguely described as ‘oriental stir-fry oil’) and a tin of ghee in the fridge, and even if I did feel like going out and buying a litre of vegetable oil, or something, the question of how to dispose of it would remain, because over here in Merry Olde, they don’t sell giant cans of pre-ground Folger’s or Maxwell House coffee, and that’s where the used cooking oil went when I was a kid. Mind you, the coffee was always made in an old school percolator, so you can see where my ability to drink instant comes from.

And yet…there is a bowl of quinces sitting on the dining table next to me. I am going to peel and chop and cook those ugly bastards, in some time-consuming and laborious way, and I won’t even think twice about it. (Although not for a couple of days, because quinces smell heavenly, and I’m going to enjoy the perfume for a bit first.) Back before the advent of carbohydrates becoming blood sugar-spiking evil, I baked a lot of bread. Again, time consuming, and mostly not for my benefit, because bread is also full of caloric evil. Gorgeous, delicious, caloric evil. So I am not at all opposed to spending a lot of time doing things the hard, homemade way, and in fact, I mostly pride myself on it, when I’m not being lazy and pursuing my quest to make food as low in calories as possible, the better to continue fitting into my clothes. Or eating chips. Whichever.

We’re at the time of life when you need to take a hard look at your vices, and how often you’re going to be able to indulge them with a hope of making the passage from middle age into what you hope will be a reasonably fit and healthy old age. So to me that’s cabbage and lettuce and root vegetables (and sometimes chips) during the weekdays, and much more enjoyable and time-intensive cookery on the weekends, when I am sharing my meals with my husband and guests. I do not claim to be consistent in all things all the time, but overall, I’m working for a balance between indulgence and restraint, which sounds so reasonable and grown up it kind of makes me wonder who the hell is this person I’ve become. Maybe the key to surviving the whole middle age thing is finding out and coming to terms with that.